Six sticks of dynamite that blasted his way to freedom... and awoke America's conscience!


Warner Bros.' hard-hitting chain-gang movie was a faithful adaptation of the similarly titled autobiography of Robert Elliot Burns. Paul Muni plays World War I veteran James Allen, whose plans of becoming a master architect evaporate in the cold light of economic realities. Flat broke, Allen is forced to pawn his war medals, which have become a glut on the market. When Allen is innocently involved in a restaurant holdup, the police don't buy his story that the robber (Preston S. Foster) had forced him to clean out the cash register, and Allen is sentenced to ten years on a chain gang. The brutal scenes that follow make the later chain-gang movie Cool Hand Luke (1967) look like a picnic in the country. Unable to stand any more, Allen escapes and heads to Chicago. Using an alias, he builds a new life for himself and within five years is the respected president of a bridge-building firm. His landlady (Glenda Farrell), learning about his past, forces Allen to marry her. When he falls in love with another girl (Helen Vinson) and asks for a divorce, his wife turns him over to the authorities. The real-life Robert Elliot Burns was still a fugitive when he wrote his exposé of the chain-gang system; the publication of Burns' book led to the abolishment of that system and an erasure of Burns' sentence. ~

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is a Pre-Code crime/drama film starring Paul Muni as a wrongfully convicted convict on a chain gang who escapes to Chicago. The film was written by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes from Robert Elliott Burns's autobiography, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! that was serialised in True Detective magazine.[2] It was directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
The true life story of Robert Elliot Burns, on which I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang is based, was later recreated in the television movie, The Man Who Broke a 1,000 Chains (1987), starring Val Kilmer.[3]
In 1991, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


Release Date: November 17, 1932


Distrib: Warner Brothers